“Health is too important to be left to the health secretary
alone,” said Dr. Howard Koh,
Assistant Secretary for Health at the US Department of Health and Human
Services. “I need the input of creative, innovative people.”

On March 12 and 13, that need brought Koh and nearly 500
policymakers, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, activists, academics,
artists and designers together at RISD for Make
It Better, a two-day symposium sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The
presentations and discussions focused on the role of art and design in helping
to better communicate healthcare information and deliver services more effectively.

In addition to Koh, speakers included Donna Garland, associate director for communication at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention; artist Mel
Chin; Grinnell CollegePresident Raynard Kington; and Sara Diamond, president of OCAD
University. These and other participants envisioned new and evolving roles for
artists and designers in the public realm – as expert communicators,
translators, problem solvers, researchers, facilitators and public policy
advocates, among others.

“Artists and
designers ask questions and create solutions,” said RISD President John Maeda. “At RISD, we don’t just
design logos, we design systems for change.”

Going well beyond ideas such as hanging art on hospital walls,
the conference framed new modes of engagement between art and health – from the
design of new medical devices, to interactive tools to make science and
statistics feel relevant, to advancing public health by fostering preventive
healthy behavior, all of which use design thinking to inject the creativity and
imagination sometimes lacking in institutional settings.

As the country approaches the first anniversary of historic
healthcare reform legislation, RI Senator
Sheldon Whitehouse set the stage for the “unlikely alliance” between RISD
and the federal government by noting that good design is essential to translate
complex information into a format that’s useful and accessible: “Engineers and
designers together created the automotive dashboard.” He added that since “we
don’t have much that equates to that in the healthcare system, this is not an
illogical alliance so much as it’s overdue.”

In their keynotes, both Koh and Garland addressed the urgent
communication challenges in public health at the national level and the need to
empower people to make healthy choices. “Nine out of 10 Americans struggle to
understand health information,” said Garland. “Good design equals healthy
action.” But she also pointed out that artists and designers aren’t just
important in creating better visual communications or in “painting pretty
pictures” to explain complex healthcare issues. “We don’t just need you for
what you can do, but for how you think,” she said. “We need you to step out
into management and policy roles to imagine how things might be done
differently.”

Koh also spoke to the need to find “creative and human ways
of reaching the public,” and presented a video of “piano stairs,” a public
health/art project in Stockholm, Sweden that used art and technology to encourage
people to actively walk up an
interactive musical staircase rather than passively riding the escalator.
“You’ve embraced the notion of problem solving for the public good,” he said.
“RISD is definitely a place where people make things happen.”

Throughout the weekend, many more examples surfaced of how
RISD students and faculty are already involved in tackling entrenched
healthcare challenges, both globally (bringing clean water technology into
India’s slums) and locally (expanding the availability of fresh produce on
Providence’s West Side.) RISD English faculty member Kelli Auerbach and Jay Baruch of Brown University Medical School spoke about a
joint RISD-Brown class they taught that focused on the body. By introducing art
students to medical settings and medical students to life drawing studios, the
class was designed to make students both better artists and better doctors.
According to Dr. Baruch, “Interacting with RISD students helped [Brown medical
students] gain confidence in dealing with the unknown and learning how to ask
questions, rather than just coming up with answers.”

“[As artists and designers,] I think we’re more used to
failure and welcome that as a learning opportunity,” said Emily Wilson MFA 11 GD. “It’s important that designers work for and
with the community.”